Player slavers: a unique product of ED and the false comparison to Eve Online

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Amanojaku

Amanojaku
Weren't the slavers banned?

I feel like I'm on the fence about this issue. Yes, it's just a video game but it could also be considered exploitation because the "slaves" were new to the game. From what I've seen/read the slavers made considerable effort to keep a lot of information from the slaves about certain game mechanics. Many of the slaves probably thought this was just how ED was, and they were given false promises of promotion and greater freedoms in the future.

Yes, new players probably could have watched some YouTube vids or went on the forums to find out they were being tricked, but we have to remember that belonging to an online forum takes being a special kind of weird. The vast majority of people who play games avoid forums/community pages like the Covid plague. Also, many people abhor YouTube for several different reasons, such as unskippable ads and it being a sanctuary for conspiracy theory and hating on everything "woke".

To be blunt I watched the Pilot's vid and the person he was interviewing was being flat-out obnoxious at times, so I don't really care if they were banned.

People get suspended and banned for in game exploits all the time. That's the category I am inclined to place this under. OF COURSE the press blew it out of proportion. That's their modus operandi. It still wasn't a very nice thing to do, and it was exploitative. Still, idk if I would have banned them. It's a tough call.
 

AECFXI

A
So I think people presumed I was casting shade in original post by using the world slavery, and I'm sensing a pattern that happens in these discussions. People end up in a semantic or sort of emotive argument about what happened because of how they feel about, well, slavery, and an accusation that it happens in the game, where they believe this is a discussion about fault. In my mind I approached the incident pretty neutrally with slavery as just the scope of their player's character's ingame participation and how the phenomenon reflected some candid truths about the game, for the sake of those truths themselves rather than for the sake of blameful evidence against the game. I don't think there's any shame in the incident so long as it didn't exploit some weakness in how the game does right by it's players, which I think did happen in the case of flow of information, but that shame is only about just the poor flow of information to players.

Was the so-called 'slavery' a bad thing/actual slavery? At worst it was in-game bullying. At best, it was an incredible phenomenon of in-game content that absolutely engaged the hell out of the rescuers. It would make sense to take some steps to avoid bullying rather than a completely players-make-their-own-destiny laissez-faire approach, but only because of the way I think it exploited a problem on the game's part which was the flow of information.

Along with this discussion missing the mark I'd been hoping for on talk about core mechanics of ED or a more developed discussion about how the flow of information (such as better integration of 3rd party knowledge into the native game's new player experience), it's also missing a chance to have a really interesting discussion about human trafficking (for the sake of talking about human trafficking, not anything blameful towards ED). I notice a lot of people aren't familiar with the phenomenon of grooming, and how some trafficked people may not even initially be aware that they've been trafficked. Regardless of what was actually experienced by the new players, what is said by the interviewee in The Pilot video registers very significantly with strategies practiced by actual traffickers. It's really fascinating to me that so many aspects of human trafficking seemed to have been represented and I think it's an absolutely incredible testament to Elite Dangerous's open world that this matter could be explored in a rather harmless way that could potentially be uniquely informative to its player base about this kind human interaction, if folks can buck the idea that this is all a rant against ED. A lot of the arguments being made against the idea that this was actually slavery I find to be at least partially reflective of dismissive arguments towards IRL human trafficking. Certainly nobody in this thread is saying anything dismissive about IRL trafficking, but the arguments like "there were X number of things the 'victim' could have done to get out of the situation at any point that were always available to them" match up well to the actual situations in trafficking, and how traffickers exploit a lack of knowledge a person has about a new environment they're brought into, as well as how traffickers try to separate the victim from a means of being able to strike out on their own (confiscating passports, impaired legal work status, jumping a carrier far away). In the interview the 7DS individual said they tried to play the villain as best they could and I don't know if they deserve an emmy or to be on a police watch-list or both.

I actually think the worst thing that happened here was just a small detail in the interview, that new players were actively scouted and invited to a discord where there was clearly hate speech happening. This alone should be a decent reason to present new players, who are usually highly wanting for some community interaction and do not automatically know about the many discords etc that exist when they first start the game, with some social media links to frontier-selected affiliates such as Inara or the Galactic Academy or just the youtube search results for "Elite Dangerous". If you go through Frontier's website to file a help ticket, there is already an official link to the Galactic Academy discord, and this could be much better integrated into the new player experience given the game is literally impossible to play without figuring out a huge amount of esoteric knowledge many of us now take for granted.
 
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WR3ND

WR3ND
I don't know. Similar could be said about typing on a keyboard to be able to effectively communicate. The game has always seemed fairly straightforward to me (mostly down to messing around with the control settings long enough to sort them out to my liking), but then I've played other video games including flight sims before. 🤷‍♂️

Online safety is another matter and a lot broader in scope than this video game.
 
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AECFXI

A
You've shared what I honestly think is the absolute worst take in this entire thread so far. Equating learning this game to using a keyboard. If you just feel like having a dig at me and you strung some words together to do that, ok sure I can understand that. But if that was really the outcome of a critical consideration of the matter, I am beyond stunned by the lack of empathy that exists for new players.

Here's a handful of the issues I had as I was learning, that I either really struggled to figure out or had to ask for help from other users for or both:

- Scanning nav beacons. It says scan the nav beacon for data about a target. You select nav beacon and supercruise to it. Come out of supercruise and in your target information, it says "Nav beacon" and it's a picture of a nav beacon. There is a reticle in space, a circle that I think says nav beacon next to it. The compass points you to it. I coudn't figure out how on earth to scan it. I even looked it up. "Oh just target it and have it in front of you for like 5-10 seconds till it finishes scanning". Nothing seemed to work. Everything says I have the nav beacon targeted, and it isn't scanning? Why isn't it working? Despite nothing in the game telling me this, I actually had the nav beacon area targeted and within the area there is a floating object that is the actual nav beacon object. Nothing prepares you or tells you that the "nav beacon" is not the "nav beacon" but actually the "nav beacon" and instead you need to target the "nav beacon".

- Increasing your jump range. I got a DBX. I got an A-rated FSD. I ENGINEERED it to have a long jump range. The game said my jump range was like 45ly. And when I selected a distant destination, I was still getting hammered with a huge number of jumps that I noticed were all only like 8ly away. Why isn't my ship, that the game is telling me has a 45ly jump range, not jumping 45ly? There was some obscure setting behind several buttons that wasn't clearly labeled that changed autopilot to use your maximum jump range. Even if you get to route options (which is hard to tell even exist if you just look at the screen since it's just an ambiguous visual icon among quite a few), it was worded in a weird way that wasn't really self-evident for what it did and absolutely nothing in the game even warned you your jump range was being curtailed by this esoteric option you need to change to literally play the game properly.

- Probing planets and finding signals. You probe a planet with the DSS, you find heatmaps for various signals for geysers or whatever, and then you land where the heatmap suggests (which right now is apparently anywhere on the planet). I find a planet that under the composition includes the mat that I want. I scan it. But I can't bring up any heatmap. Am I doing something wrong? Is the game glitching? Are the controls mis-mapped? I try keyboard, joystick, remapped joystick, restart the game, watch youtube videos, bang my head against a wall. I didn't realize that under "Features" there was "Features" that needed to say "Geological". This one is a frustrating example of how if something doesn't exist, the way the game makes it seem like its broken or hides the zero value information from you. I wouldn't have gone nearly as crazy if when I tried to select a heatmap filter the game gave me an output that said "Planet has no filters", or when I looked at a planet info it said "Geological features: none" instead of hiding that there is even a "geological features" value in the game at all when its value is none.

And these are just the issues I remember clearly. Other people have had huge issues with other things, such the game not saying what needs to be scanned on the megaship to complete "infiltrate the data link" missions. I happened to figure that one out without being given any further instructions, but just because I didn't have trouble with it doesn't mean it isn't an issue that other players struggle with that needs to be addressed. Although I'm finding out there's quite a lot of player-created content on Youtube etc for ED and I don't want to say they're all bad at what they do, a lot of content creators are not explaining key details that aren't obvious to new players. They end up making content for other veteran players without being able to detach themselves from the basic knowledge they have and leaving new players lost or confused over esoteric details that weren't included in some videos.
 
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WR3ND

WR3ND
I didn't mean it as a dig. My wife and daughter don't know how to use a keyboard with touch typing. I'm just saying that it isn't something that just happens, but that could be said for a lot that people often take for granted, so I was trying to relate it to what you were saying with that. I think they're comparable at the fundamental levels, but if not, my mistake.

Take it easy. o7
 
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Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
AECFXI said:
Here's a handful of the issues I had as I was learning
Click to expand...
When did you start playing?

I ask this as, if recently, there is a very good selection of training missions now included in the game (including an excellent one in Odyssey that seems to have been very well thought out) which are very recent, much like the starter systems, so a lot of hand-holding has been put in place since I started playing. (Only around 4 y 5 m)

Yes, there are 'oddities' in the game where things are less than obvious - your example of economy route plotting is one that many new players (including me, when I was in my first few weeks of play) fall foul of at some point, I'm sure. Interestingly, Odyssey appears to default to Fastest Route rather than Economy plotting, which is a sensible move.

Maybe, being a gamer for 40 years or so has primed me to 'find out' myself, rather than need to ask, although my first visit here was to ask a question, so I don't claim to be all-knowing, just more inclined to learn by my own efforts, and make some spectacular lessons learned along the way.

There is a .pdf manual of the game to be read (or printed if one is so inclined) which helps a little, although the last version I saw was pretty ancient.
 
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